lockscreen
May. 5th, 2022 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clairelutraPreface
lockscreen
One of the most unnerving things for Numair to realize later on (when Daine was sixteen and abruptly a young woman with fire in her eyes and a much more active love life that he desperately, shamefully, wretchedly wished to be a part of) was just how long Daine had been his phone's home screen.
It was such a small thing, really, but—the week after he had met her, when she had been all of thirteen, his home screen had become been one Onua had taken of the two of them on the camping trip when they met.
It had been an innocent enough picture. He had picked it because some way, somehow, she had gotten an owl to land on her arm with him right beside her, and the memory of it made him smile every time he looked at the picture he had managed to snap. The awe on Daine's small, almost doll-like face and the large barn owl's serious, piercing gaze before it had fluttered off again made for a rather magical thing to look at.
Moments like that, he had thought then, were once in a lifetime.
Of course, knowing Daine in the months and years afterwards had proven to him that they were once in a week moments for her—and the more time they spent together, the more they became weekly for him as well.
Still, the photograph had remained until about a year and a half later, when they had gone to visit the mountains together, and he had snapped a photo of an incredible view along one of the trails. To the side, just at the edge of the frame, Daine sat against a fence, one knee pulled up and her phone and her lunch in her lap while she held a very serious conversation with a squirrel and a marmot.
The composition and charm were stellar, and it seemed like a shame not to see it every time he opened his phone.
There had been exactly two weeks when he had replaced that picture with another—the mathematical equation that he had done his senior thesis on, as it had been in that amorphous time before Daine—and that was when she had her first relationship with someone who made her glow with interest.
(Numair had tried not to notice that Kaddar Iliniat looked a bit like a younger version of him, and somewhat succeeded... or, at least, he had at the time.)
Then they had broken up, and suddenly looking at that picture didn't ache (much) anymore.
Somehow, it ended up being replaced by a picture of a very sleepy Daine tucked up against her equally sleepy teacher's side as they both sat under a fossil in a natural history museum.
There was no particular reason it had to be that one, instead of any of the number of other pictures they had taken there, but none of the rest had filled him on the inside quite like that one.
And then—then everything had gone to hell, and he had come out the other side knowing he would die to get a taste, then perish anyway if he couldn't have this sense of utter connection for the rest of his life, and Daine, with her velveteen starlight eyes and stubborn chin, still somehow smiled at him without a drop of reserve.
The matter of phone home screens was on his mind a few months afterwards when he saw her lock screen, and finally thought to ask about it after years of wondering.
"What made you choose that one?"
She looked up, her eyes sending a flicker through his bones when they met his, then blinked at him. "Pardon?"
"Your lock screen," he said. Her home screen was a much more predictable picture of the two of them plus Onua, Cloud, and Kitten, but her lock screen, instead of being anything to do with animals or even earthly nature, was a starry night sky, and had been since he had bought the thing for her.
She looked down at it, blinked again, then turned her phone at an angle and smiled fondly. "The first two constellations you showed me—Aquarius and Pisces. Our signs?"
...Well. He hadn't expected that.
"I didn't know you were so interested in astrology," he said, even as a flutter tickled his stomach. He hadn't thought anything of it, but for all these years, their signs had been her lock screen?
She shrugged. "I'm not, but I like these two." Then she looked back at him with a grin. "But everyone on the web says ours get along quite well. The two of us were written in the stars."
It took him several seconds to manage a strangled, "Oh," and he had to turn away before she could see his blush. The back of his neck burned traitorously under his horsetail.
"...Numair?"
"Their accuracy is astonishing," he said, and mostly came off like his heart wasn't pounding and his mouth wasn't just begging to be laid across hers. She had no idea what that sounded like. "Have the horoscopes said anything about what an Aquarius and a Pisces should have for lunch?"
"The one in my belly says the sandwich shop on the corner shall bring us very good fortune in luck and love," she replied promptly. He could hear the unbearably warm, teasing smile in her voice.
He very sternly told himself that that wasn't an invitation, not by a long shot—that it really just couldn't be—and cleared his throat before saying, "In that case, who am I to object? The sandwich shop it is."
She beamed.
Later, he discovered that she changed her home screen to the silly selfie they took there, and changed his to match without even a drop of guilt, the warmth in his chest growing all the sweeter every time he remembered how she softened whenever she stopped to look at the picture herself.
